I was listening to a radio programme while tootling around the Highlands and an American of some representative description (not sure if he wasn't a Senator or just a wannabe one) was laying down the law, as is the Yanks' wont, about how the Libyan Megrahi should now be extradited to the States in order to get punished properly for Lockerbie.

For this paragon of respect for human rights, the fact that Megrahi was convicted and imprisoned for the crime, and eventually released on compassionate grounds, under the law, thereby closing the matter under the same law, is absolutely irrelevant. In fact, he pooh-poohed the argument, along with the subsidiary argument being made that Megrahi's conviction was pretty unsafe in the first place, as evidenced by the fact that a Scottish Review Tribunal had opted to send the whole thing back to the courts before his release.

It is worrying how when the prospect of appealing to voters on the right raises its head, politicians of a certain stripe dispense with any semblance of respect for human rights and the rule of law, while protesting vehemently, like Hamlet's mommy (if memory serves) way too much that they want the law to take its course.

What they want, really and truly, is for people they assume to be guilty to be banged up, preferably without the waste of time and money a trial involves, and if silly notions of human rights become an obstacle, why then we'll just re-write the law. That Cameron fellow in the UK is proposing to go down that very route, it's not only a foible of the Americans, though in Cameron's case, he is also going for the anti-Europe attitude that pollutes so much of British sentiment.

This is why, of course, politicians - especially the ones who just can't help themselves when an easy sound-bite makes itself available - should opt to shut up when they are tempted to talk about matters of law and justice. The former is made by politicians (one of the more unfortunate results of having to adopt democracy, faux de mieux) but the latter is dispensed by judges, who do not have to make themselves popular with the great unwashed and who can therefore do their job properly.